U.S. Rep. Steve King, conservative Republican from Iowa, made news recently by dismissing so-called “dreamers” — illegal immigrants who were brought here as children by their parents, but who think of themselves as American — as basically a bunch of criminals:
“For everyone who’s a valedictorian,” King said, “there’s another hundred out there who weigh a hundred and thirty pounds, and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act.”
King’s statement drew immediate condemnation and derision, for understandable reasons. Fact-checkers exposed the bad sociology and math behind King’s claim, and even House Speaker John Boehner jumped to the dreamers’ defense, calling the remarks by his fellow Republican “deeply offensive and wrong.” It was a useful case in which the political world set the boundaries of acceptable discourse, and it deemed King’s rhetoric outside those boundaries.
If you think about it, though, there’s a deeper irony to the remarks by King. If he and other like-minded souls succeed in sabotaging immigration reform in the House, they would help to create the very problem that they claim to condemn.
We know some things about this situation. We know that we have a group of 10 to 12 million people within this country who came here illegally, most of them drawn by economic opportunity. We know that by now, most of them have been living and working here for years, having arrived during that era in which we tacitly welcomed them as a source of cheap labor, before the economy tanked and before border and workplace security were tightened.
We also know that most of them have no intention of “self-deporting,” to use Mitt Romney’s indelicate phrase. They are a hardy bunch, and nothing that we can do to them within the limits of a decent society and on the massive scale required could convince them to go back where they came from. Those who pretend otherwise are the true “dreamers.”
For example, remember the harsh immigration laws passed by Georgia and Alabama legislators in 2011? Initially, the laws led thousands of illegal immigrants to flee both states, creating a serious manpower shortage in the region’s agriculture industry. But two years later, the Associated Press reports, the situation has returned to normal and “in many ways it appears that people have gone on with life much as it was before the laws were enacted. Farmers say many of the foreign workers have returned because the laws are not heavily enforced and it once again seems safe to be here.”
We know something else as well. Take any group of strivers — and by coming here these people have self-selected as strivers — and place them in a situation in which they cannot hope to achieve within the system. What happens?
Human nature says they will attempt to strive and achieve outside the system. Not because they are inherently corrupt or criminal, but because they are human beings who have families to support and ambitions to pursue. Dreams thwarted in one form will soon take another form.
Without immigration reform that includes a path to legalization if not citizenship, we condemn a population of 10 to 12 million people to life in a permanent underclass, operating outside the law and off the official economy and confined to the tight-knit immigrant communities that give them camouflage. That is not good for them, it is not good for us, and it is not good for the process of them becoming us.
Again, that’s the deeper irony: Those who condemn illegal immigrants as some sort of criminal population unlikely to integrate into the American mainstream are advocating policies that would make their own fears come true, or at least more true than they need to be. There is a wiser, saner and more humane way to handle this for everybody involved.
